I charged the cavern mouth like all the legions of Hell were behind me. I couldn’t say whether they were chasing me or rallying behind me. Either would have felt about the same. Maybe it was both.

  I was past seeing red. I saw flames.

  That fire lit my path into the cavern, and grew brighter as my eyes adjusted. I was briefly surprised to find my path constrained by walls. Low, clay ones, about as tall as my shoulders. They bracketed the cavern just inside it. They were ancient. Built by the same people who’d made the cliffside village, perhaps. Or their enemies. They were far short of the cavern roof, but they would have been a formidable obstacle to a massed attack. Especially attackers without firearms.

  Like the wall at the cliffside village, this one had a single entrance. Johnny Dee might have been expecting me to use it. I’ve always aimed to surprise.

  One thing that isn’t so obvious to outsiders about super-strength is that it applies to legs as much as arms.¹⁸ I vaulted over the wall with space to spare, and landed tucked in a roll on the other side.

  18 Has to! With superstrength, if you’re not braced against the ground as hard as you punch, Newton’s Third Law will send you flying! –Ed.

  Johnny Dee was at the far end of the cavern mouth, maybe sixty feet away. All I could see of him was a pale orange silhouette, but that was enough to show me him holding his arm away like something had bitten him. Probably Wolfram’s death. I saw no sign of the doll he must have used to control Wolfram. He’d probably tossed it away when it shocked him. He had the hunched look of a man who’d narrowly avoided electrocution.

  Good. Let him hurt.

  He spotted me the same instant I saw him. With a desperate lurch, he darted back into the shadows. There didn’t seem to be any weapons in his hands, but that didn’t mean he was defenseless.

  The roll had left me disoriented and dizzy. I drew my revolver and fired. Too late. Johnny Dee disappeared behind a wall I hadn’t seen in the darkness. Rock chips and dust blasted across the cavern floor.

  I ground my teeth. I could have made that shot just a few years ago.

  Too slow. Too old.

  One bullet left in the revolver. An unknown number in Dad’s Beretta. I chased Johnny Dee into the darkness.

  The cavern was a lot larger than it looked outside. It sloped deeper into the earth. The cavern’s prior inhabitants had raised roofless buildings of stone and packed dirt. Places to live and work during a siege or while under threat of invasion, maybe. It would have been a fascinating place to learn more about, in another time. I didn’t see any archaeologists’ placards. It could have been that Johnny Dee and I were the first human beings to set foot in here since the original builders had cleared out.

  The complex had been even larger once. When my eyes finished adjusting, I saw that the back of the cavern terminated in an ancient rockfall. At least one of the buildings was half-crushed underneath it. That left about a dozen others that Johnny Dee could have taken cover in. A hiss of pain drew me to the east side of the cavern.

  It had come from one of the buildings in the back. There wasn’t enough overhead room for me to vault this one’s wall. I charged through the door.

  With a cry of rage, Johnny Dee crashed into my bad side.

  He’d caught me in mid-stride, my foot off the ground. All the superstrength in the universe couldn’t change the basic physics of that. He knocked me to the side. We crashed into the wall, shaking centuries of dust loose. It sprinkled all over us.

  Johnny Dee slammed my revolver hand into the packed earth wall. One of us tripped the trigger. The gun went off. A shame. I still had Dad’s Beretta, but, at this range, I wouldn’t need it.

  I didn’t know what Johnny Dee had been thinking, trying to engage me in close combat. My strength versus his was about as fair a fight as an asteroid versus a cabin made of toothpicks.

  As soon as I got my balance, I stomped hard on his boot. His foot broke in a satisfying snap. He yelled in shock, but not for long. I grabbed his neck in one hand.

  From the angle I’d gotten him at, I couldn’t quite snap his neck. But I could do a pretty good job of crushing his windpipe.

  I lifted him off the ground in one hand. He grabbed at my arm with both of his, but couldn’t shake me.

  Something wet, warm, and slimy brushed my bare arm.

  In the back of my head, distantly, I’d registered that I hadn’t felt Johnny Dee’s shirt collar as I was choking him. He’d taken his shirt off. Shadows writhed across his silhouette.

  Oh God. The maw and tentacles.

  One of the tentacles lashed across my arm. It wasn’t all slimy and soft. Something hard and ridged, disconcertingly like fingernails or teeth, scraped across my skin. And then a searing pain drove into my muscles.

  I let Johnny Dee go. I had no choice. The pain was incredible.

  The muscles in my arm turned to liquid. I hadn’t known before that Johnny Dee’s tentacles could sting, but I’d never gotten that close to him. It made sense that he’d keep this secret close to his chest, so to speak, until the moment came.

  I reached for my Beretta with my other hand. It wasn’t my shooting arm, but, in these close quarters, even my left hand could score a hit. I only got as far as pulling the gun free. The pain forked through my body like lightning. All the muscles in my body – even my lungs, even my heart – were trying to lock. It took every ounce of strength I had to batter back the pain. The Beretta dropped through my twitching fingers.

  It fell next to Johnny Dee, who’d collapsed the second I released him. He was gasping for air, in agony. He didn’t stop to pick up my fallen gun. He couldn’t think through his pain any more than I could think through mine. He pushed away from me as fast as his broken foot would let him.

  My pain came in waves – growing and subsiding and then growing again. Blackness crawled along the side of my vision. I looked at my arm. Blood beaded from half a dozen puncture wounds in a neat little line. It didn’t look that bad for all the agony pulsing through me.

  Johnny Dee couldn’t stand. He scrambled backward, fast as he could with his one good foot. In different circumstances, him scooting across the floor on his butt might’ve looked funny.

  He hadn’t chosen this building at random. He crawled over to a surface of raised packed earth in the corner, where something was waiting for him. There was just enough light to let me see what it was.

  It was a little doll. Of me.

  The face was no great resemblance – it looked like somebody had tried to sculpt it out of melting candle wax. But my long hair was distinctive.

  Johnny Dee spat, breathing hard. “Been a while since I’ve tried to take you over, Outlaw,” he said. “I bet that shield of yours is a lot weaker by now.” This was why he’d been delaying me. He reached for the doll.

  Panic surged through my gut. It pushed enough of the pain back to the point I could crawl toward him. His fingers clasped the doll.

  His telepathic assault crashed into me like a tsunami wave. Some remnant of Magik’s shield must have still been there, or I wouldn’t have stood a chance – but it was plain that most of it was gone by now. It felt like I was forcing my way through a tidal wave at the same time the earth was shaking apart underneath my boots. The ground between Johnny Dee and me widened, and violently split apart. We were on opposite sides of an uncrossable chasm.

  In the real world, all that had happened was that I’d stopped crawling, and cringed back from Johnny Dee. Some part of me was aware of that. The force of his telepathy felt more real than reality. It was like I was trying to keep upright while standing against a firehose.

  But I’ve stood my ground against firehoses before. Firehoses are how you know a protest is drawing attention. Marching for mutants’ rights had felt like pushing against an unmovable force. We’d faced worse than firehoses out there. I kept pushing against this unmovable force, and I succeeded. Inch by inch, I crawled toward Johnny Dee. The sides of the chasm drew closer. The drop disappeared.

  I grabbed for the doll. He jerked it away. Something wet and pulpy slapped against my unstung arm. The needle-tips of stingers caressed my skin. I was ready this time. My hand was already in my back pocket.

  I pulled out my knife, flicked the blade out, and swiped.

  The tentacle’s jellylike mass made for easy slicing. The tendril on my arm went limp. Then it fell away.

  Half a second later, agony burned through my arm anyway. Some of the venom must have gotten in. It wasn’t as bad as last time, but it was enough to keep me from capitalizing on Johnny Dee’s distraction as he screamed.

  Johnny Dee had talked about the maw and tentacles on his chest as if they were separate beings. I never figured out how literally to take that. But he certainly reared back like he’d felt its pain.

  The thing was, his scream wasn’t alone. Something else was shrieking, too. Right below his chest. A high, unearthly voice, that sounded like it had an echo built into it.

  Johnny Dee still held onto the doll.

  I locked my hand around his wrist and gripped him hard enough for my nails to draw blood, but that was all it could do. Between the venom and the telepathic battering, I no longer had the strength to break bones. The mental attacks were getting worse. His thoughts battered me down. They were tainted by rage and pain. I tasted his intentions, like gunpowder on the back of my tongue. He no longer intended to puppet me. He was going to kill me.

  Another tentacle lashed out, caressed the base of my neck. Its teeth and stingers brushed over my carotid artery.

  I could hardly think through all of this, but I made myself try. Johnny Dee’s telepathy, however else it worked, was based on two things: the dolls he used as a focus, and the maw on his chest. The maw created the dolls. Feed it DNA samples of a person, and it would hatch out the dolls.

  I had no idea what would happen if it were fed some of Johnny Dee’s own DNA.

  His blood ran underneath my fingernails, mixing with the sweat on his palms.

  Sometimes, the wild card is the only choice you can make. I knew what would happen if I picked any other option. Nothing good.

  I didn’t have the leverage to peel Johnny Dee’s fingers back. But, by bracing my knee on the ground, I wrenched his arm back. He almost fell onto me. He fought to keep his weight off his bad foot. Then, with what fading strength I had, I shoved his hand, together with mine, toward his chest.

  Into the maw.

  Layered rows of teeth sliced my wrist. Then my hand plunged into something sickeningly moist and hot, firm and dripping.

  My hand, his hand. His blood. My blood. The little toy doll of me. All went in together.

  A tight pressing feeling, like puckered lips, sealed over my forearm. With the ringing in my ears, I couldn’t hear the wet gulping sound, but I could feel it. The maw squeezed painfully hard.

  It was a proper blessing that my memory of events broke there.

  Twenty

  On a dry, clear day at the ranch – which was most days – I could see the school bus coming from a mile away. Not the actual bus itself, though. Too many hills in the way. But the clouds of dust pluming up were unmistakable. By age five, I’d learned to recognize all different sizes of vehicles coming this way. I was twelve now. The dust Dad’s big horse trailer kicked up looked a lot different than the school bus, even though they were about the same size.

  On the mornings when I could see the dust, it was a countdown timer. I had a minute or two left to complete whatever homework assignment I’d put off until that morning. Once I got on, the other kids certainly weren’t going to let me finish.

  Most of them hadn’t forgiven me for being so far from the rest of the route’s stops and making their trip longer. And that was before we got into the whole mutant thing.

  Elias came with me every day, but wasn’t much help. He was younger than most of the kids, and couldn’t face up to them. I’m not sure he would’ve if he could. He didn’t want to have much to do with me. Half of the kids in his class already called him a mutie just because he was related to me.

  If he’d had an X-gene, too, we figured it would have manifested by now. But – you know kids. The facts of it didn’t really matter.

  In a lot of ways, him being “normal” made him an easier target than me. He had fewer ways to defend himself.

  Elias wasn’t with me today, though. The bus was headed away. I didn’t often stick around to watch the bus go. Usually, as soon as I was out of those folding doors, I had too much to do outside to pay it much attention.

  The last thing I wanted to do was get any closer to home.

  The school had yanked one of its bus drivers back on duty to give me a solo ride home. Usually, after suspending kids, the principal had them wait in her office staring at the wall until it was time for everyone else to go home, too. Under the circumstances, though, they didn’t want me anywhere near other kids.

  They’d had to pull a second bus driver, too, to take another kid to emergency dental surgery.

  The kid deserved it. I had no regrets there.

  I watched the bus’s trail of dust dwindle for as long as I felt like, which turned out to be a while. Eventually, though, I had to start the long walk down our drive.

  I wasn’t terribly surprised when I rounded the next bend and found Dad walking toward me. He must’ve been out with the horses and seen the bus’s dust come and go. The principal had said she’d called him. She’d been lucky to get a hold of him. His jeans and denim jacket, and even his mustache, were stained tan with dust. He would have been out working most of the day.

  My chin trembled. I would have done anything other than have the conversation I knew we were bound to have. But I wouldn’t let myself go in any other direction. I was no coward.

  Dad set his big hand on my shoulder, and pointed to a grassy hill just off the drive. “Let’s sit and chat.”

  My feet were leaden at the start of the climb. Strangely, though, they got lighter as we approached the top. I knew what I was going to have to say. I didn’t know what I was going to face after that, but starting the battle was the hardest part. When we got to the top, I sat. This was one of the only places in the ranch, outside of the horses’ pasture, where you could sit without getting sand in your pants.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” he asked.

  “I’m not an idiot,” I told him. “I know I’m stuck in some kind of mental combat with Johnny Dee.”

  He blinked. Opened his mouth and closed it. Of all the things I could have said, that seemed to have been last on his list of expectations. He didn’t have anything prepared.

  I’d said it with more vitriol than I ever would have used with my real dad, but I wanted the words to stick – and in me as much as him. All along, I felt this place, whatever was happening to me, tug me in a million directions. It was trying to tear me apart. Rip me into fragments, shreds of memory. Convince me I was here and not there. If I didn’t keep myself rooted in the truth, I worried that I really would lose myself to the dream.

  This place had power, like dreams usually did. I knew it wasn’t real. But I wasn’t in control, not even of myself. My memory was foggy. If I didn’t keep reminding myself that this was a dream, I worried that I would forget it.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s probably true–”

  “Definitely true,” I interrupted.

  “–definitely true,” he conceded. “I don’t understand what you mean to do about it.”

  I shrugged. I was in a child’s body, sitting on a Texas hilltop with my dad. My options here seemed limited.

  White static fringed my vision. I smelled things I shouldn’t have – nickels on the back of my tongue, citrus tickling my nose. Most of me was here, on this hill. But the rest of me was being spun in a dozen other places at once. It was like a crowd of people had each grabbed a limb and yanked in different directions.

  All I could see, though, was that no one else was around. It was just me and Dad.

  And he wasn’t real.

  I held up my arm, studied the shape and muscle mass. I really was twelve. Same age as I’d been when I really had sent another kid to dental surgery and been suspended for the rest of the school year. (The only reason I hadn’t been expelled was that the administrators knew as well as I did that Marcos had it coming.)

  But the other details were messed up. Dad and I hadn’t had the hilltop conversation then. That had happened when we’d talked about whether I wanted to take a year off and home-school, just to let things between me and the other kids cool off. And the weather had been worse then. We’d actually just gone up to watch a storm roll in, and ended up talking about the other stuff, too.

  Like a dream, as soon as I thought of the storm, the horizon grayed.

  Shadows washed over us. Still, not all of my senses were working. The grass waved and flattened as a wind swept through, but I couldn’t feel a thing.

  When I looked up, clouds loomed over us, taller than mountains. Big and dark and tumorous. In this part of Texas, we were just outside tornado alley. We didn’t have to worry about deadly storms as much as Oklahoma and Kansas, but they still came around sometimes. My first recurring nightmares used to be about tornadoes.

  I knew right away that, if that storm hit me, I wouldn’t be able to keep myself together. The storm would overwhelm me. My senses were being pulled in other directions already. In there, they would fly apart.

  “Storm’s a-brewin’,” Dad intoned, because he thought he was funny. He enjoyed stating the obvious with as much folksy gravitas as possible, like he was understudying Sam Elliott.

  “My God, Dad,” twelve year-old me had said, back then. “Please don’t be that embarrassing around other people.”

  Little brat. I didn’t let her say that this time. But, somehow, Dad reacted as though I had. He raised an eyebrow to cover his hurt. “I don’t see any other people around.”

  The twelve year-old in my memory wanted to answer again, but I blurted, “I do.”